And how was a man to answer a question like that? Tan said, “Of course you shouldn’t discuss with me anything your cousin told you in confidence,” because it was important to establish a good, honest character if you wanted anyone to tell you their secrets, far less other people’s secrets.
Mienthe nodded, but distractedly, as though she’d barely heard him. She declared, “You expect people to have lived their own lives before you ever met them!” Rising to her feet, she paced rapidly to one side of the little chamber and then back again.
“But sometimes it’s a shock, to find out about those past lives,” Tan suggested. He couldn’t imagine what had happened. Something to do with her? With him? With someone else?
“Yes, exactly! I knew perfectly well my cousin did something to stop us fighting the griffins. And then something else when he was in Casmantium. But I don’t know”—she flung her hands sharply upward for emphasis—“anything! Do you know about that? Especially about the Wall? The Wall in Casmantium, I mean, the one between the griffins and… and everybody else?”
“We had reports, of course.” Tan watched her carefully, trying to think what might have prompted these questions. “Those events six years ago were the subject of some speculation in the Fox’s court, I believe. I wasn’t… I’d barely arrived in Teramondian that year. My attention was all for trying to win a place at court. I’d have assumed the people of the Delta would follow their own lord’s actions a great deal more closely than even the most interested of the old Fox’s advisers.”
“I was only twelve,” Mienthe said, not really to him.
“What happened?” Tan asked patiently
“Oh… this griffin came to see my cousin. Did anybody tell you that?”
Tan was rendered, for once, utterly speechless. Whatever he’d expected the young woman to say, that hadn’t been it. He cleared his throat, but then only waved weakly for her to go on.
“No one did? Well, you were sleeping all day, you said, and then I suppose everyone thought you shouldn’t be troubled.” She gave him an anxious look.
“Don’t stop there!” Tan said, and laughed. “That would trouble me!”
“Oh… yes, I suppose.” Mienthe smiled, too. “Anyway, yes. A griffin. A mage. A griffin mage, I mean. He wore the shape of a man, but… I didn’t know griffins could do that. Not even their mages. Not that you’d have ever mistaken him for an ordinary man. Anasa—I don’t remember his whole name. Something Kairaithin.”
“A griffin mage.” Only long practice allowed Tan to keep the disbelief out of his tone.
“Yes. Oh, yes. He was very—he was—you could tell. He helped my cousin six years ago, and he helped build the Casmantian Wall. I think,” she added, somewhat more doubtfully, “I think he is my cousin’s friend, but…”
“But he didn’t just slip down from the griffins’ desert to wish your cousin a pleasant evening,” Tan prompted her when it became clear that the pause might lengthen.
“Well, I think he came to warn Bertaud that the Wall is going to break,” Mienthe said, simply, as though she were in the habit of constantly providing amazing information in the most casual way.
“Ah.” Tan hadn’t seen that coming at all. He tried to think of everything he’d ever heard concerning the great Casmantian Wall. He knew that some Casmantian makers and mages had gotten together and built it in a day and a night and another day, or so the wonder of the making had been reported. He knew it was supposed to forever divide the country of fire from the country of earth… He gathered that “forever” had been a slight overestimation.
“He said the… the balance had been disturbed. Between earth and fire, he said. He said the Wall is—is cracked through. At both ends, I think he meant. When it breaks, something terrible will happen, and he said it will shatter in a few days or a few weeks—” Mienthe’s voice was rising.
“But not tonight, I hope,” Tan said, deliberately wry to offset any incipient hysteria. “So what did your lord cousin do about this?”
“Oh, he and the king went north, to look at the Wall, above Tihannad, you know…”
“Of course.” That explained why her cousin had not stopped Mienthe from joining that little raid into Linularinum, which Tan supposed made the griffin’s warning a good thing for him, if for no one else. He asked cautiously, “What disturbed the balance, did this griffin explain that? What terrible thing will happen if the Wall breaks?”